Industrial visual inspection apparatus, such as borescopes, can be used to collect media files such as image files and video files, including audiovisual (multimedia) files. Operators of such apparatus have historically manually associated data records with collected media files using; for example, a written notepad and have used printed materials (e.g., printed instruction manuals or printed job guides) to guide them through an inspection procedure. Inspectors who rely on written notes and printed materials may lose track of where they are in an inspection process. For example, inspectors may “snap away” aimlessly when performing inspections capturing repetitive video and still images several times over as a result of having lost track of what images have already been collected and what images need to be collected. At the same time, equipment articles being inspected are often online industrial process machines or power plant machines, or replacement articles for such machines, which desirably are inspected with a minimum of down time. The inability of present day inspectors to keep track of what images need to be collected can result in protracted down time of process machinery and significant economic losses owing both to protracted down times for completion of inspections and required re-inspections where steps of an inspection process were not completed by an inspector. Further, unlabeled and undescribed media files hinder an expert data management agent's capacity to decide if a collected image or video should be considered ‘pass’ or ‘fail.’ Because undescribed media files inhibit proper comparison with reference to images and videos, inspection procedures often have to be duplicated. The efficiency of an inspector is further limited by the requirement of taking written notes. The capacity of an inspector to remain focused on the required steps of an inspection are compromised by forcing the inspector to write written notes and leaf through printed material while performing an inspection.
The use of written notes to record data, in addition to compromising an inspector's ability to remain focused on an inspection, also makes it difficult to review and analyze media files collected during an inspection procedure. For correlation of a collection of media files with a certain job task, an inspector or other data management personnel might, after a collection of media files has been collected, view the handwritten notes taken by the operator in connection with the multimedia files at a workstation and then manually associate a job task index to the media by way of keyed-in data entry at a workstation. The above described data management method results in data entry error and judgment error. For example, inspectors using the above method may make inaccurate written notes regarding a scene being subject to image file or video file collection. Inspectors have also been observed to avoid taking written notes altogether when faced with time pressures for collecting media files or when encountering stressful (e.g., high heat or poor air quality wearing gloves in a cold environment) working conditions. The result of a commonly encountered multimedia file collection effort is simply a large collection of unorganized image files and/or video files with no indexing and no written notes and with the only guide for organizing the files being the memory of the human inspector operating the inspection apparatus.